Ringfort (Cashel), Ballymulqueeny, Co. Clare
Co. Clare |
Ringforts
What survives at Ballymulqueeny is not quite a wall and not quite a ruin; it is something in between, a circular enclosure that has been slowly returning itself to the landscape for perhaps a thousand years or more.
This is a cashel, a type of ringfort built from stone rather than earthen banks, and the example here sits on a gentle south-facing slope in County Clare, where the natural rock of the ground and the deliberate work of early medieval hands have become almost indistinguishable from one another.
The enclosure measures roughly 23 metres east to west and 22 metres north to south. At the western side, a proper wall still stands, albeit low, with internal and external stone-facing still legible to anyone who looks carefully. Moving around to the east, the boundary softens into a spread of loose stone, wider but lower. At the south, even that has gone, leaving only an external scarp, a shelf in the ground about 1.3 metres high, which is the last trace of what was once a substantial enclosing element. An overgrown mound sits in the southern sector, its purpose unrecorded. Perhaps most telling is the way the builders appear to have incorporated existing rock outcrops directly into the structure, making use of what the hillside already offered rather than working entirely against it. The site was recorded on Ordnance Survey six-inch maps in both 1842 and 1920, marked each time as a circular enclosure, which means it has been noted, mapped, and quietly passed over for the better part of two centuries.